The (dis)pleasure of getting old

Make no mistake on that. It feels really bad to get old. It didn’t matter as long as I was in teens; even early 20s seemed fine. But slowly, as days pass by, I’m feeling a bit bad about facing peak adulthood.

With my 24th birthday in the horizon, things are looking bad. I mean; gone are the days when I was waiting to sport a beard and look like a man. I’ve grown long past that. Two years back, white hairs starting spouting out. It wasn’t a problem finding the one or two odd ones and cutting them short, but it is a problem to find so many.


You know you are getting old when:

• Sad-looking guys keep coming home with the only motive to fix you up with someone. Worst is when they tell you “it’s time to get married”. It pretty much reads like “Doomsday is in. Not much time before you get down the drain.” The accompanying giggle sounds almost satanic.
• Guys around you slowly stop wearing those funky T-shirts and start wearing the 1950s plains, checks and stripes.
• You get mails from the classmates of yesteryears that they’ve gotten married and they’ve got kids and all’s well.
• People start calling the beer-belly as ‘corporate lifestyle’ and a mark of businessman-ship, whatever that means.
• Classmates starts saying “make the most use of these days”, as though there is no tomorrow.
• People don’t look at you anymore as a geek who knows how to use a computer; everyone around you with two hands and two legs know that.
• ‘Sir’s and ‘Uncle’s become common when people address you.

Unaware of all this, I’m sure my friends are going to wish me “long live for hundred years” when the midnight comes, but that’s really not what I want them to do. I don’t want that day to pass. I don’t want sympathetic faces from the youngsters who look at me like some lost charm of yesteryears.

I’ve starting to grow this feeling when those young cousins of mine started speaking about some mobile technology that I find only in the advertisements, and about some band called Mogwai that ‘rocks’ these days. How weird and odd sounding that is. If you are as confused as I am, may be its time for you too to consider the techniques to stay young.

Worst is when parents continuously speak about marriage when you go home to relax, an opportunity that you get once or twice in a year. Even if you manage to use all you learn in management to stop them by sounding like a really intelligent person who has certain ‘goals’, ‘missions’, ‘visions’ and ‘roadmaps’ in life, those old creepy guys continuously stream in with that astrological Greekish parchment that decides the fate of a lot of people and spoil all the fun. In the end, as always, parents have the way and all you could settle for is a 3 year delay. Three years. Just 1000 odd days between all the fun and marriage, kids, responsibility and associated stuff. It’s becoming impossible to pass a day without thinking about all this.

Oh God! Save me.